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“In space, no one can hear you scream” went the famous tagline for Alien. In John Krasinski’s clammy-palmed survival horror A Quiet Place, screaming is a lot worse than fruitless – it would instantly be the end of you. The slightest sound, in the film’s post-apocalyptic vision of a human race in hiding, will send a scavenging alien straight to your door.

These creatures, which we glimpse only in alarming flashes for the first hour of screen time, have no other senses at their disposal – you could shine a floodlight into their faces, puff cigar smoke into their toothy maws, and no harm would arise. Drop a pill bottle, though, and they’ll tear you to shreds.

In practice, as the Abbott family perform a daily dumb show in order to remain intact, this means a lot of sign language. Headed by Krasinski’s Lee and by Emily Blunt, his real-life wife, as Evelyn, the Abbotts have got this down to a particularly fine art.

Because their eldest child, played by Wonderstruck’s deaf actress Millicent Simmonds, has always had no hearing, it’s implied that, in the years since the invasion, they may have enjoyed a kind of evolutionary advantage in outwitting their predators. Most of American society, on the other hand, has simply been too helplessly loud, too incapable of shutting up, to find safety.

The Abbotts have built a farm hideout – less American Gothic, more Edward Hopper – in some wooded corner of the Hudson Valley, near a corn silo. Their survival systems are complex – there’s an elaborate set of warning beacons rigged up outside. They pad around barefoot, and food, none of it crunchy, is eaten without plates or glassware, but hand to mouth. In the basement, forbidden to the children, Lee tries to make radio contact on foreign frequencies, and also experiments on new hearing aids for his daughter.

Evelyn is also pregnant and the advent of a squalling child is obviously going to pose some extra challenges. Without giving anything away, the timing and circumstances of her labour – in a bath, under threat – are about the worst a film character has ever had to endure. Blunt rises to the occasion with a performance that’s almost exhaustingly credible, as Evelyn devotes every ounce of her energy into stifling her agony, buying herself more time. An exposed nail on the basement steps, thus far unnoticed, is a potentially mortal enemy.

Krasinski has directed two little-seen indies before, but in terms of premise, stakes and execution, he has struck gold here. It’s such a great, simple idea – a little redolent of 2000’s Vin Diesel thriller Pitch Black, where it was light, rather than sound, that was the problem. We get to know what level of minute whispering the family can get away with, when a knocked-over lantern spells disaster, and why yelling under a waterfall is OK.

Simmonds, once again, is very compelling. Krasinski displays great nous in including this deaf character, who is missing out on rather little in the circumstances, except for being the only one forced to rely on others’ reactions when the monsters draw close. She’s matched to the hilt by Noah Jupe, from The Night Manager and Wonder, as her younger brother Marcus – a child actor so quick and expressive that his terror-stricken apology, when he causes a sound, inspires protective feelings in an audience.

Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying. The emotional heft that Krasinski is after is narrowly missed, too – there’s a waft of Hollywood cheese in certain decisions that brings the experience home with a light bump. Nothing’s derailed, thankfully: it’s a mercilessly effective game of hide and seek, tiptoeing around its well-designed habitat with real ingenuity, and the Abbotts, warmly conceived, are troupers to the last.